The recent assault by Joe Stack in Austin, Texas, by small aircraft, on an office building containing an IRS facility had such obvious parallels to 9/11 that few in the mainstream media failed to pick up on it. Indeed, in the wake of the attack, the Pentagon ordered two F-16 fighter jets to be scrambled out of Houston to investigate, and Obama was even briefed on the incident at the White House.

The similarities that were predictably not picked up on, however, were among the very first that came to my mind. Now, I want to give all 9/11 official-story skeptics their due: There are many, many events both surrounding and that occurred on that day that have yet to be explained to my satisfaction. For our purposes at present, however, let’s assume that al-Qaida, or some Middle-Easterners were involved in some way (as many 9/11 skeptics believe anyway). It then becomes incumbent upon us to ask: What makes some people so angry as to do something this wicked? Answer? Antagonism over a long period of time. The American government has diplomatically and militarily needled and provoked the peoples of that region since at least the 1950s, when the CIA deposed the democratically-elected shah of Iran. That was what ultimately led to the 1979 Islamic revolution in which the U.S. embassy was invaded and numerous Americans were held hostage for almost a year. Such continued behavior, in addition to an unabashed bias towards and support of Israel, ultimately led to – at the very least – arabic peoples participating in 9/11. Foreign terrorism, as it applies to America, has a quite apt term to describe it: Blowback. What you dish out comes back to you.

So what could make a man like Joe Stack – by all accounts a peaceful, friendly software engineer and musician from Texas, angry enough to perform a less devastating, but similar action? Well, there’s a little government agency that goes around stealing people’s money under the threat of jail or death so that the interest can be paid on the debt the government has run up with the private Federal Reserve corporation. That wonderful little group squirming lice are known as the Internal Revenue Service – or, IRS, as above. And here in America, they are really little more than domestic terrorists. In contravention of most of their own “laws” and regulations, they require that people declare their earnings as income, file returns, submit to audits, subject themselves to wage withholding (supposedly temporary and voluntary in 1943, now no longer considered as either), and hand over a percentage of their money every year – for businesses, every quarter.

Given this, is it any wonder that there aren’t a whole lot more John Stacks? It remains to be seen, as government grows and becomes ever more intrusive and arrogant, whether there will be.

Irwin Schiff, the great anti-income tax activist (currently American political prisoner) once said something like, “Hating the IRS and not the rest of government is like hating a fist instead of the guy who threw the punch.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s time for Americans to wake up to that simple truth, and reject the very idea of government altogether.